Charlie Hebdo attacks: Hollande says magazine ‘reborn’

FRENCH President Francois Hollande has insisted Charlie Hebdo and its values will survive, after the new edition of the satirical weekly sold out in hours.

“Charlie Hebdo is alive and will live on,” Mr Hollande said.

Millions more copies of the magazine are being printed because of demand.

It comes a week after Islamist gunmen murdered 12 people at its offices and five others in subsequent attacks. The new edition has angered some Muslims by depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The cartoon shows the Prophet weeping while holding a sign saying “I am Charlie”, and below the headline “All is forgiven”.

“I am Charlie” emerged as a message of support for both the magazine and free speech following the attacks that started on 7 January.
“You can murder men and women but you can never kill their ideas,” President Hollande said following the publication of the latest edition.

He said the magazine had been “reborn” in the week after the killings. It will have a print run of five million issues this week, dwarfing the normal circulation of about 60,000.

The “survivors’ issue”, as the magazine calls it, is available in six languages including English, Arabic and Turkish. Proceeds are going to victims’ families.

Eight journalists, including its editor, were killed in addition to four others when two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris on 7 January. In a separate attack in the city two days later, an Islamist gunman killed four Jewish men and took hostages at a kosher shop.

The same attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, is believed to have shot a policewoman the day before. A video purportedly from al-Qaeda in Yemen (AQAP) said it planned and financed the Hebdo attack as “vengeance for the Prophet”, but did not provide evidence to support its claims.

The gunmen are said to have used earlier publication of images of the Prophet as justification for their attack on the magazine.

AQAP had previously welcomed the assault, without acknowledging any role in the operation.

A lawyer for Said Kouachi’s wife, Soumya, has told the BBC she had no idea he was an extremist. He said Kouachi had kissed his wife goodbye and told her he was visiting his brother, because he was unwell, just hours before the Charlie Hebdo attack.

“It’s beyond her understanding, her world has fallen apart,” the lawyer, Antoine Flasaquier, said. Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish another cartoon of the Prophet drew threats from militant Islamist websites and criticism from the Islamic world.

The Islamic State (IS) militant group said it was “an extremely stupid act”.

The release comes after millions – including dozens of world leaders – took part in a unity rally in Paris on Sunday.